Baroness D'Souza: My Lords, I am fully aware that we are at Report stage and I will therefore be as brief and to the point as I can. However, this is an important matter: the amendment aims to provide a simple but effective mechanism to investigate aircraft suspected of being involved in the illegal practice of extraordinary rendition.
	There is no suggestion that the UK Government are practising, or have ever practised, extraordinary rendition in any form—of course not. But up until Monday of this week, there was circumstantial evidence to suggest that the UK may have facilitated this practice by allowing refuelling stops by aircraft used by the US Government or private aircraft owned or leased by the CIA for the purpose of transporting detainees to a third country for interrogation. Yesterday, the Armed Forces Minister, Adam Ingram, disclosed that aircraft suspected of being used by the CIA had in fact landed at British military airfields.
	When this issue was first raised in Grand Committee last December, it was judged to be both inappropriate and inapplicable in large part due to the terms of the Chicago convention. However, that is now acknowledged by the Government to be irrelevant, and I quote the answer given by the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, in response to a Written Question from the noble Lord, Lord Lester:
	"Nothing in the Chicago convention restricts the right of the appropriate authorities under UK law to board an aircraft for the purpose of arresting a person who they have reasonable grounds to suspect has committed or is committing an offence".—[Official Report, 1/3/06; col. WA 62.]
	In fact, research carried out by experts in international transport law shows that the Chicago convention and the later Tokyo convention impose a positive duty on the part of government to investigate. The Tokyo Convention, for example, allows a state to interfere with an aircraft in flight if,
	"the exercise of jurisdiction is necessary to ensure the observance of any obligation of such State under a multilateral international agreement".
	We are dealing here with illegal seizing, transport and possible—even likely—torture of individuals. This practice infringes just about every human rights treaty on the books, including the torture convention, which, as is well recognised, carries an absolute prohibition of torture, no matter what the circumstances.
	The facts surrounding this practice of extraordinary rendition are hard to come by. However, such is the concern, uncertainty and suspicion that it has occurred and continues to occur, possibly on a regular basis, that no fewer than 10 European member states have set up official inquiries into US transport and CIA flights into their respective countries. The Secretary-General of the Council of Europe reported last week on a year-long study into extraordinary rendition, in which he said:
	"It would appear that most of Europe is a happy hunting ground for foreign security services".
	He goes on to say that,
	"hardly any country . . . has any legal provision to ensure effective oversight of the activities of foreign security services on their territory".
	I quote again:
	"European skies appear to be excessively open . . . very few countries seem to have adopted an adequate and effective way to monitor who and what is transiting their airports and airspace. Indeed, no member state appears to have established any kind of procedure in order to assess whether civil aircraft are used for purposes which would be incompatible with internationally recognised human rights standards. This is alarming because the explanations provided on the specific point of controls over aircraft allegedly used for rendition show that existing procedures do not provide adequate safeguards against abuse".
	The former Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, is quoted in a report by the Swiss Senator Mr Dick Marty as accusing a number of European countries of hypocrisy in that, while benefiting from the intelligence that the Americans gather, they publicly distance themselves from the methods by which it is obtained. The UK National Air Traffic Services confirmed on 22 February of this year that in the past five years two aircraft believed to have been chartered by the CIA, as identified by their registration numbers, had passed through the UK on more than 200 occasions.
	The Government, in denying any awareness of extraordinary rendition, have relied heavily on a firm statement made by the current Secretary of State, Miss Condoleezza Rice, just prior to her departure for a European tour last December, in which her very carefully crafted words denied any involvement in extraordinary rendition. However, we have to be very cautious here. The US has derogated from the "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" clause of the UN torture convention. This allows it to interpret such acts as falling short of torture. Moreover, the wording of the statement includes the sentence,
	"the US has not and will not transport anyone to a country where the United States believes that the person will be tortured".
	It could well be argued that what the US believes does not necessarily conform to the beliefs of the international human rights community.
	I am as interested in preventing terrorist acts as anyone else. I do not wish to appear a harridan, but the practice of extraordinary rendition is monstrous and monstrously illegal. The amendment before your Lordships, for which I gratefully acknowledge the painstaking work of Liberty, Redress, the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture and several legal experts, is straightforward and highly relevant to the Civil Aviation Bill in that it deals with a mechanism to ensure that aircraft flights conform with the statutory obligations of the Government. It simply empowers the appropriate authorities to require aircraft suspected of being involved in extraordinary rendition to land and to be searched. I suggest that this is the only way in which dangerous rumours and suspicions can be put to rest and any future acts of extraordinary rendition via the UK can be pre-empted. I beg to move.

Lord Garden: My Lords, I support this amendment, which is also in my name. The credit for it, however, must go to the noble Baroness, Lady D'Souza, for having seized the opportunity that the Bill gives us to address the serious problem of rendition.
	We explored the issue in Grand Committee, and the noble Baroness has explained the importance of clarity in this area. We accept the Government's assurances that they will not facilitate rendition of people through UK airspace or airfields. After all, in Grand Committee, the Minister gave us such an assurance in the strongest of terms:
	"There is not a Member in this Committee, not a Member in this House and not a Member in another place who is not greatly exercised about the issues. It has been made clear by the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary that our abhorrence of the concept of torture is such that we will have no compliant part in it in any shape or form".
	These are strong assurances. I am sure that your Lordships will welcome such assurances from the government Benches.
	In Grand Committee, the Minister made it clear that the problem was that he saw the amendment as one which would wreck the Bill:
	"We could not possibly put into legislation an amendment which abrogated our obligations under international conventions for air travel".—[Official Report, 8/12/05; GC169.]
	As we have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady D'Souza, he should be happy now, because we have done the necessary work to show that that was a misconception. We understand that, in the pressure of Grand Committee, one can often make mistakes about the intricacies of international law. We have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, that the Chicago Convention will be fine under this; we have had it from our expert air legal adviser, Professor Richard Gardiner of the University College London, that Tokyo Convention Articles 3.3 and 3.4 come into play. All these things make it possible for this amendment to work.
	I am not a lawyer, but it seems that we all agree that we must investigate and then prevent flights which facilitate torture, and that we are allowed to do so under international aviation conventions. This amendment gives us a way to make it happen. I trust that the Government will now accept it, having had an opportunity to look at our international obligations in more detail than was possible in Grand Committee.
	One more aspect which concerns me is the exchange of correspondence between Adam Ingram, the Defence Minister in the other place, and my right honourable friend Sir Menzies Campbell, reported in yesterday's Guardian. That has lifted the lid on the involvement of military airfields in providing access to these mysterious CIA-sponsored aircraft. In Grand Committee, I asked the Minister for some explanation of the status of charter aircraft operating on behalf of a foreign government, but received no answer. Now that we know that these aircraft operate through RAF Brize Norton and RAF Northolt, we need to think through what that means for how they are handled.
	RAF Northolt will be familiar to those who have had ministerial appointments. It is a rather special airfield; it is where ministerial, Royal and other VIP flights operate from. It is also, because of its location close to Heathrow, restricted in the number of movements allowed, so I assume that the authorities take some interest in every flight authorised into and out of RAF Northolt. I suggest that easyJet might find it difficult to get slots there.
	Presumably the station commander has some guidance about which flights he is allowed to accept, or perhaps a direction from her Majesty's Government. These fights cannot count obviously as United States military flights because the military does not operate them. Whatever their status—I would be interested to know how the Minister sees their status—I trust that the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General has given his, as always, very useful advice to the Chief of the Defence Staff, who in turn can relay it to the group captain at Northolt just to ensure that he is not committing an illegal act by providing facilities for an aircraft that might be involved in extraordinary rendition.
	The amendment would give much-needed clarity on what must be done, and, we can assume, would ensure that both the civil and military authorities would take appropriate action when they needed to follow up suspicions. I look forward to hearing from the Government their full support for it.

Lord Dykes: My Lords, I thank wholeheartedly not only my colleagues but the sponsors of the new clause from other Benches. I support all the arguments that have been deployed so far. I shall add a few brief points of my own, conscious of the fact that I was not in Grand Committee and that the House is now reaching a late hour. However, it is the job of the Minister to give a convincing response—at least intermediate, provisional and pro tem answers—to some serious questions that have been raised in this debate.
	What is happening in Guantanamo Bay and the extraordinary rendition scandal—that is the only word for it—are the two things that cause more unease than any other aspect; not least, the activities of the coalition forces in Iraq, the insurgency, and all that. Therefore, it is a very solemn moment at this stage of this Bill for the Government to reflect soberly about those searing and searching questions. I agree most warmly with the noble Baroness, Lady D'Souza, in her, as my noble friend Lady Williams said, brilliant explanation of the detail on this matter; and the disturbing aspect also alluded to by the noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davis: the United Kingdom gives the impression of compliance and complicity in a matter that is wholly unlawful internationally and should be rejected by a country such as the United Kingdom, which prides itself on its continued adherence to the rule of law.
	I think that I am allowed to say without offending anyone—because there are pluses and minuses in these long histories—that there have been questionable activities by the CIA throughout the world for many decades. We think of South America; we think of Indonesia many years ago; we think of aspects of CIA behaviour elsewhere. That is why we in this House and in the other place are grateful for the vigilance of the British and international press on those matters and the demand for the Americans to change their practices. The answers given by Condoleezza Rice were not answers at all. They were evasions of a true answer. That must be addressed again at the highest levels of the US Administration. That is causing massive concern not only in the United Kingdom but in the other member states of the European Union, especially those who feel that they are being illegally used without their governments knowing anything about it. That is an extraordinary state of affairs that must be dealt with.
	I am glad that the "unlawful rendition" definition is dealt with in one subsection of the new clause, because the adjective itself allows the United Kingdom to make a first step in legal terms to cover itself from being complicit in acts of the United States that are totally illegal under international law. But that is only a first, small step, and more needs to be done. The only way that the United Kingdom can stay within both the international convention on human rights, especially on torture and the use of torture, and the European Convention on Human Rights is to excise and exorcise those practices and insist that our American allies and colleagues—so they are called; and if they are allies and colleagues in the true sense, they will respond to our overtures—outlaw those practices.
	Although I am not an expert observer of the construction and definition of the wording, I am especially minded to be attracted by new subsection (5), which, if the new clause were enacted, allows officers to remove items from planes suspected of unlawful or illegal activities.
	The noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davis, may be correct that perhaps separate primary legislation should be considered, and Third Reading may provide further opportunities to discuss these matters. But, in the meantime, surely it is the duty of the Minister, who is well respected in this House for his very high standard of response, to give us some preliminary reassurances that the Government take this matter very seriously, particularly in view of the United States Government's inadequate explanation and the fact that the names of detainees have disappeared, other names have not been mentioned, and no one knows who these detainees are or where they are in the world. Are they in Guantanamo Bay or elsewhere? Are they in European countries? Have they been sent to Egypt or to other countries? There are rumours that they have been sent to Syria, which sounds extraordinary, bearing in mind the regular United States hostility towards that country. These matters must be dealt with, and I hope that the Minister will be able to give us some reassurances, at least on a holding basis, this evening.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
	[Amendment No. 23 not moved.]

Lord Davies of Oldham: moved Amendment No. 28:
	Page 12, line 33, at end insert—
	"( ) But an order under subsection (3) may not provide for subsections (2) to (4) of section 2 to come into force before 1st June 2012."
	On Question, amendment agreed to.
	[Amendment No. 29 not moved.]
	Schedule 1 [Policing of airports]: